Posted 5:46 PM by Hill
Do we have the high ground - and does it matter?

There is little that hasn't been said about the situation vis-a-vis Iraq. The Vice President seems to want to attack them this week. The President seems convinced that an attack should be made, but (probably because he is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces) won't give details. The Europeans appear to be opposed to an attack on Iraq because of various reasons, or at least various reasons are stated for their reluctance. Most of the reasons seems to boil down to a combination of a stated distaste for unprovoked attack and an unstated, but fervent desire to gig America wherever possible. There are many problems inherent in any unprovoked attack we might make on Iraq, which is not to say that Iraq doesn't need a change of leaders. That seems to be the subject of widespread agreement in the West. All Moslem nations seem to be united in the opinion that attacking Iraq would cause the entire region to erupt in war. Hmmm. There does seem to be quite a bit of self-serving rhetoric floating about in the air. What are the facts of the case? In a statement by Dr. Joseph Kostiner at a conference on Islamic fundamentalism, we learn,
"Terrorism is the violent manifestation of a frustration that modernity induces in Islamic groupings. Organizations that employ terror inveigh against the existing social order and attempt to annihilate it completely. Most Islamic thinkers have not reached such extreme conclusions but a few are very vocal. There are two main streams of Islamic terrorism prevalent: one is the Iranian Shii stream inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini which is practiced by the Hizbollah in Lebanon at the behest of its leader Fadlallah. The other is the Sunni stream inspired by Sayyid Qutb and is observed in Egypt and Gaza etc." Given such a bent, there seems little doubt that we have a cultural/religious conflict on our hands. This may take awhile to communicate to the American public, since such a conflict here would be viewed as aberrant and almost insane. To Moslem fundamentalists, however, who have sanctified death and who worship a god whose peophet exhorts them to kill unbelievers, a conflict involving the deaths of thousands, or millions of unbelievers as well as the suicides of some Moslems who were selloing their lives at the highest possible price would be perfectly logical. It's sort of the mirror image of making the world safe for democracy. Should we attack Iraq? Almost certainly, since Saddam Hussein would not hesitate to sell any weapons of mass destruction he had on hand to a group that intended to use them against Americans. Do we have the moral high ground? No. Mr. Hussein has not attacked us, and we are not directly threatened by his government. Such an attack would not fit into the concept of the "just war" as first outlined by St. Augustine. Should we attack Iraq anyway? Maybe. How afraid are we that he will directly or indirectly attack us later on? How many American and/or European lives could be saved if we attacked? Would an attack encourage Hussein to use whatever weapons of mass destruction he already has against us and Israel? There are enough imponderables in this conflict and potential conflict to make your head spin, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that, based on the quote above and many like it over the past eleven months, we may very wellbe in the kind of war that will mean the survival or demise of western civilization. This has happened before - more than once. It happened in the fifth century when Atilla's hordes crossed first Asia, then Europe like a scythe. They were stopped at the battle of Chalons in 451. The next time was in 732 when the Moroccans crossed the pyrenees and attacked France. They were crushed, not to say nearly destroyed by Charles Martel at the battle of Poitiers in 732. The Turks invaded Europe in 1375 and the last bastion of Christianity, Constantinople, fell to them in 1453. Spain was reclaimed by Fernando in 1492 and the Turks were driven out of eastern Europe in 1589. Since then, the West has been safe from Moslem invasion. For those who do not see how a Moslem invasion could be worse than the government they already have, the process is this; once Moslems have control of an area where Christianity is the prevailing religion, the men are almost all killed. Some who are intelligent and/or strong, as well as young, are castrated to make them docile and converted into slaves. All the women and children are enslaved . Any among the populace who convert to Islam are left alone, but are still stripped of all property, and many become beggars. Another Moslem invasion would be right along these lines. Should we attack Iraq? Perhaps not, but we SHOULD keep our powder dry, because there are millions in the U.S. who will not believe that Moslems are capable of treating a conquered populace as described above until they see the evidence on the evening news. Unfortunately, the massacre of the Armenian Christians by the Turks was in 1915, and the only people who actually remember this event were children at the time. By the time Americans are convinced that there is real danger from Moslems and that they intend us no good whatsoever, it may be too late to do anything substantive about it. Make no mistake; we are facing another threat to western civilization just as real as that faced in the Balkans in 1375 and in France in 732. Those who are running this terrorist "army" are determined to destroy the west and everything it stands for. They are equally determined to replace it with an eighth-century hereditary caliphate run by Moslems.